Mark Cerny on PS4: “We Didn’t Want the Hardware to be a Puzzle”

Cerny talks about getting middleware companies into the mix for the PS4.

After the reveal of the PlayStation 4 on February 20th, Mark Cerny, the lead system architect, quickly became one of the more important individuals in the gaming industry over night. He spoke about the need to be more “developer-centric” with the PS4, and now, he speaks to Gamasutra about trying to simplify things this time around for development.

“The biggest thing was that we didn’t want the hardware to be a puzzle that programmers would be needing to solve to make quality titles.”

Cerny actually interviewed developers and technology companies on the ideal components for a next-gen machine. Unsurprisingly, this included unified RAM and 4-8 Cores for the CPU. “When I started talking to the development community, prominent middleware companies were in the mix at that time. It’s very important to us to have those engines on our platform.

“I have to say, also, the insights that you can get by talking to their top technology people – It’s quite nice to have those insights when doing the hardware design.”